


Mountain Rescue

by eerian_sadow



Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Generation One
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Mentions of Injuries, Search and Rescue, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-06
Updated: 2015-05-06
Packaged: 2018-03-29 08:44:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3889915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eerian_sadow/pseuds/eerian_sadow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wasn’t a security bot back on Cybertron, but skills aren’t always forgotten.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mountain Rescue

**Author's Note:**

> this takes place sometime during Red Alert’s first winter on Earth, which sets the story sometime in season two. In my head-canon, Red Alert was a part of Inferno’s search and rescue team on Cybertron before the war. He just shifted focus when things got out of control on their home world and safety became more important than finding the lost.
> 
> Thanks to Wicked3659 for the beta.

  
For two Earth days, the sky dropped freezing bits of water and slush across the countryside. The water immediately solidified upon contact with the bitterly cold ground and covered the land in a blanket of ice that was blindingly reflective in the daylight and almost invisible at night. By the time the ice storm was over, everything was buried in a layer of frozen water almost three inches thick.

It wouldn’t have been bad really—not with their sophisticated technology allowing them to travel the slick terrain more safely and their superior strength allowing them to pry open doors and move objects that had fallen in the storm and frozen to the ground—if not for the fact that three of their number had been caught out in the storm. Jazz and Blaster had both checked in since, as soon as the storm gave them enough clear comm signal for it, and they were safe inside a repair shop in the city.

No one had heard anything from Ironhide since a few hours before the ice started falling.

Red Alert had been quick to gather up any members of the crew who had search and rescue experience and organize a search. In another time and place, the life of one mech would not likely be worth the effort, but the situation was different on Earth and one mech could—and often had—make the difference between victory and utter defeat at the hands of the Decepticons.

And… Ironhide was a friend—had been for a long time—and Red was loathe to just give up on a friend.

The security director was the first to step out onto the ice when the search started. Almost immediately, his feet slid on the frozen surface and he was forced to revise his initial safety statistics. “Lighter framed mechs, stick to your root modes. You aren’t going to be able to move safely on this ice in your alternate modes. Any mech not using the roads to head into the city to search should probably do the same as a precaution.”

The other Autobots made noises of assent and moved off into their search patterns. Red Alert gestured to Inferno and the two of them moved off carefully to do the same. They moved carefully along the road leading up to the _Ark_ , looking for any signs of a mech skidding off the road and into the trees.

For almost an hour they searched for any signs, moving slowly and carefully across the treacherous ice. They had almost reached the edge of their designated search area when one of Red Alert’s feet slid out from under him on a low patch of road and he fell. He slid off the road and down the incline alongside it before Inferno could grab him. He managed to grab a tree and stop himself before he could fall any further—and off the side of the mountain.

For one spark-arresting moment, he had been sure he was going to deactivate.

“Red! Are you all right?!”

“I’m unhurt,” he replied, “But I don’t think I’ll be able to get back up on my own.”

“Just hang on! I’ve got you on my sensors, so I’ll throw down a tow cable.” He could hear Inferno up on the road, moving carefully. After a few moments of crunching sounds, he heard a cable rapidly unwinding and then a large tow hook landed next to him. “Okay, Red. Grab the hook and I’ll pull you back up.”

Carefully, the security director reached out and took hold of the hook. He secured it under his bumper and gave an experimental tug. When it held, he called up to Inferno. “All right, pull me up.”

“All right!” There was a long moment where nothing at all happened, and then Red began to move back up the incline. “No worries, Red. I’ll have you up in a minute.”

Red Alert wasn’t worried—not about his own safety anyway. He trusted Inferno implicitly and knew the other mech wouldn’t let anything untoward happen to him. Instead, he turned his processor toward refining the search, as none of the teams had any luck with finding their missing mech yet.

As a result, he was not expecting Inferno’s shout of “Aww, slag!” or to be sliding back down the slope at a speed that would have had the Twins hesitating for fear of their lives. He scrabbled at the ground as it moved under him, desperately trying to catch some sort of hand hold.

Then there was no ground under him and for a long, frozen moment, he swung out into open air.

And then he swung back, slamming into the mountainside hard enough to rattle internal components. He dangled there, held only by the strength of his bumper and a prayer that the hook wouldn’t come unbent from his weight. Quickly, he wrapped both hands around the tow cable and tried to find some kind of purchase for his feet on the rock. The mountain face wasn’t sheer at this point, but it was steep enough that it might have been, and his feet simply slid off the frozen surface.

“Red!” Inferno’s voice called out. “Primus, Red are you hurt?”

“Cosmetic damage,” the security director replied. It was even true; he’d been incredibly lucky when they had fallen. “What happened?”

“My footholds gave out. I have hold of a pretty sturdy looking tree right now, but that don’t leave me enough hands to pull you back up.”

“Call Skyfire for a pick-up then. We’re stuck here otherwise.” As he answered his friend, Red looked around to see if he could spot _something_ that he could rest his feet on to lessen the strain on the tow hook and cable. When he glanced down, he felt his spark surge with joy.

Resting in a tangle of rocks, exposed roots and the better part of a young tree was Ironhide.

“Inferno! Lower me approximately twelve feet!” His fear for his own deactivation was replaced by excitement with seeing his friend. “I found him!”

“You found him? Down there?!” Inferno swore in an old Kaonite dialect and started playing out the cable. “No wonder no one could find him. Bet he slid off the road same way you did.”

“Most likely.” Red watched his descent carefully. His relief was almost palpable when the tips of his feet touched the rock outcropping supporting Ironhide. “Stop, Inferno. I’m here.”

The security director ran his scanners over the rock outcropping, checking for stress points and to see just how much weight it was likely to be able to hold. It didn’t look like it would be strong enough to support the weight of another full-sized mech, so Red Alert continued to hang there, with only the tips of his feet touching. He moved his scans to Ironhide instead.

The ice had done them a favor, he quickly saw. There was a bright splash of pink against the older mech’s side, but it was covered in a sheet of ice that had kept the energon from leaking down the mountainside. It had also done a fantastic job of sealing Ironhide to the rocks and debris, keeping him from sliding further down if he moved wrong. It also had the more detrimental effect of cooling down the red mech’s internals and dropping his body temperature down below something their scanners would recognize as living.

If Red Alert hadn’t slid off the road above, Ironhide would have laid here in stasis until the next thaw and then bled out before any sensors detected his vital signs again. He said a quick prayer of thanks for the life of his friend.  



End file.
